No, "both sides" DON'T do this.

The false equivalence has already started, with Village analpundits bleating about "both sides" needing to dial down the rhetoric.

What they refuse to admit is that only one "side" repeatedly uses violent, eliminationist language and images to attack the other.

Threats of violence are the province of conservatives, teabaggers and rethuglicans, and always have been. Digby has the facts:

This is an astonishing list of violent rhetoric and political violence over the past two years. In fact, it's almost unbelievable.

Here's just one week last summer, which culminated a week later with this shoot out with police:

July 2, 2010—The Wyoming Department of Revenue suspends sales tax collections at the state's gun shows because of "increasing animosity" toward field tax agents. Dan Noble, director of the department's Excise Tax Division, cites one particular incident at a gun show that "crossed the line" and says, "We tend to have more trouble at gun shows than any place ... I have 10 field reps throughout the state, and every one of them has experienced some animosity ... I don't want to put my people at risk."

July 3, 2010—Joyce Kaufman, a conservative radio hosts on WFTL in Florida, tells a crowd of supporters at a Fort Lauderdale Tea Party event, “I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendments rights was they gave me a Second Amendment. And if ballots don’t work, bullets will. This is the standoff. When I say I’ll put my microphone down on November 2nd if we haven’t achieved substantial victory, I mean it. Because if at that point I’m going to up into the hills of Kentucky, I’m going to go out into the Midwest, I’m going to go up in the Vermont and New Hampshire outreaches and I’m going to gather together men and women who understand that some things are worth fighting for and some things are worth dying for.”

July 6, 2010—Herb Titus, a lawyer for Gun Owners of America, tells Religion Dispatches, "If you have a people that has basically been disarmed by the civil government, then there really isn't any effectual means available to the people to restore law and liberty and that's really the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms—is to defend yourself against a tyrant." Titus goes on to cite the "totalitarian threat" posed by "Obamacare" and "what Sarah Palin said about the death panels."

You won't believe how much of this there is out there. It's swirling throughout the ether. It's real.

And it's right here in Kentucky. Check out what Media Czech found on the facebook and twitter of a prominent republican political operative.

Steve Benen cites George Packer in the New Yorker:

This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We've all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

Don't let anybody get away with pretending violent rhetoric and images is something "both sides" do. It's not. It's a right-wing, conservative, republican phenomenon, as David Neiwert documents in his book The Eliminationists.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?